"The studio describes it as an interactive parable, the story of a lone traveller and their path through life told in the form of a voyage that starts in the vast expanses of a desert and ends ... well, to tell you how it ends would spoil it. You think you know what Journey is going to be about after the first five minutes, but you don't. I came to it expecting something charming, visually stunning and perhaps even mildly edifying. I left thinking that it may well be, in many ways, the best video game I have ever played.

You play a traveller swaddled in red robes, beginning atop a desert sand dune with a view of a shining mountain on the horizon. You're given no direction; instead you're guided by the natural impulse to move towards that looming, distant beacon. Control is intentionally simple and unobtrusive; you can only walk, jump and sing, but Journey still crafts some astounding scenarios from those bare gameplay ingredients. It has you surfing down sand dunes in the fading light, scaling towers, flying on the wind and cowering in underground ruins as you slowly uncover what could have happened to the civilisation that must have once lived there."

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"The Hero's Journey is a pattern of narrative identified by the American scholar Joseph Campbell that appears in drama, storytelling, myth, religious ritual, and psychological development. It describes the typical adventure of the archetype known as The Hero, the person who goes out and achieves great deeds on behalf of the group, tribe, or civilization"